The National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP) of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan, and the Intellectual Property and Science business of Thomson Reuters have announced a collaboration to standardise definitions of research funding organisations by analysing and updating funders' acknowledgements within the Web of Science.
When evaluating the strength of a university or organisation's research efforts it is critical to understand how funding for the projects was acquired and distributed. There is often significant variation in how individual researchers, organisations and universities attribute research funders, making it difficult to conduct effective analysis. Properly identifying research funding organisations with a high number of variants in title is a time-consuming challenge for researchers and for staff in charge of research fund management.
As part of its 'Science for RE-designing Science, Technology and Innovation Policy,' NISTEP has conducted a name-based aggregation of Japanese research funding organisations appearing in scholarly paper acknowledgements within the Web of Science.
This joint analysis examines how to conduct name-based aggregation of acknowledgement information within a research publication at an organisational and institutional level. The creation of unified titles and definitions for funding organisations will ease the burden on researchers and better facilitate relations between funding resources and research outcomes.
The addition of this structure for identifying Japanese research funders to NISTEP's map of the nation's scientific research efforts will increase scientific trend analysis, identify, the current status of Japan's research funds distributions, and the influence of research funds on the advancement of scientific research.
